1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer programming. More specifically the invention relates to a method and a data processing system for editing the source code of a computer program. Furthermore the invention relates to a data processing program for editing source code and to a computer program product.
2. Description of the Related Art
From the prior art, a number of different source code editors are known. Such editors are computer programs, by which texts in a computer programming language can directly be edited by human software developers. There are editors, which can be used for a number of different programming languages. Other editors are adapted for a specific programming language, like Java, C++, XML, or the like. Source code editors can be realized as part of a software development system or as stand-alone application. Examples for publicly available modern source code editors are jEdit (available from www.jedit.org), or NEdit (available from nedit.org), or the editor inside the Eclipse SDK (available from www.eclipse.org). In addition, there are many more modern source code editors available as part of commercial Software Development Toolkits by several companies.
Every time a human developer edits a source code of a computer program there is the risk of accidental typing and programming errors. Both types of errors may lead to a subsequent malfunction during execution of the edited software on a computer.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an easy source code editing technique, by which programming errors and type errors can reliably be avoided. In particular the present invention is directed to avoid such errors in cases where the user introduces changes to a source code, which are supposed to leave the semantics of the source code unchanged.